[R] R under Pocket PC

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Tim Cutts wrote:

> On 9 Nov 2004, at 12:27 pm, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Lars Strand wrote:
> >
> >> Will R run under Windows Pocket PC?
> >
> > We don't know!
> >
> > There are no binary versions of R for that platform, but perhaps you 
> > could
> > find a suitable compiler and manage to build the sources.
> >
> > Outside pure mathematics it is usually very hard to establish that
> > something cannot be done (and it can be very hard in pure mathematics,
> > too).
> 
> Do PocketPCs generally have enough memory to run something as big as R? 

Yes -- have you not seen the size of SD cards these days?  An R for 
Windows install is under 50Mb and needs about 12Mb RAM to run.

>   A standard R install requires a lot of storage space, by PDA 
> standards...
> 
> Technically, I don't suppose there's much to stop R running on some 
> PDAs, especially those based on Linux like the Sharp Zaurus, other than 
> storage and memory requirements.  If there's a Qt graphical interface 
> available for R, you could even get graphics working on the Zaurus, 
> potentially.  

That was not the question.

> The Windows API on Pocket PC is quite a reduced subset 
> compared to full Windows, so you might have problems with that.  

But that was.  However, as I said, you would have to find a suitable 
compiler or cross-compiler, that supports enough features (and I suspect 
IEEE arithmetic would be a problem, especially as it is for VC++ on full 
Windows).

Perhaps you would like to write such a compiler, as technically there's 
not much to stop you?

> PalmOS would probably be right out.  :-)

I think you are belittling the work done to get R running on as wide a 
range of platforms as it does.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595